In chapter twenty-three entitled, “The Devil in the Vicar” of Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, the character Mr Walton hears the church organ playing:
… the old organ woke up and began to think aloud. As if it had been brooding over it all the week in the wonderful convolutions of its wooden brain, it began to sigh out the Agnus Dei of Mozart’s twelfth mass upon the air of the still church, which lay swept and garnished for the Sunday.
Of course I wanted to listen to this work and started an online search. I searched for a twelfth mass by Mozart and found one but not the one Mr Walton heard because that piece, popular in the 1860s1, was written by Wenzel Muller.2 It is interesting to think that George MacDonald would have associated this piece with Mozart his entire life. A good example of mis-attribution playing throughout history.
Read this in the novel on the online shared document: https://docs.zoom.us/doc/gtD9UyrgRruzjsCe4rY5tA?comment=dc8ec0eb7ffd4af3a404fb01de2a5b96&source=docs&commentType=1
Footnotes
- Link to “Agnus Dei” by Wenzel Muller on YouTube: https://youtu.be/lffijMSIfQY?si=t9cyEB8LkdGl_buT ↩︎
- Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart%27s_Twelfth_Mass,_K._Anh._232 ↩︎